Добавил:
Sekretar
kiopkiopkiop18@yandex.ru
t.me/Prokururor I Вовсе не секретарь, но почту проверяю
Опубликованный материал нарушает ваши авторские права? Сообщите нам.
Вуз:
Предмет:
Файл:Ординатура / Хирургия / Библиотека им академика М.И. Перельмана / Книга_5734_Библиотеки_им_академика_М_И_Перельмана
.pdf
2 Introduction
unfulfi lled promises of laboratory equipment, and personal patents
usurped from the nation circulate in their recollections. This book tells
the intricate stories behind six plants that competing groups of plant
specialists have sought to transform into pharmaceuticals since the 1880s.
The analysis centers on plants sourced in African countries, following
their migration from markets to laboratories around the world. Specifi cally,
it looks at new medications made from rosy periwinkle, Asiatic pen-
nywort, grains of paradise, Strophanthus, Cryptolepis, and hoodia. Some
of the pharmaceuticals have been profi table, most have led to patents,
and all have resulted in controversies among the many people who have
claimed rights to the plants and their biochemical constituents. These
cases provide a new framework for understanding priority, locality, ap-
propriation, and benefi ts in the quest for new medicines.
Bitter Roots is the fi rst comparative history of the pro cess of drug
discovery from plants across different regions of Africa. Above all, it
shows how chemists, healers, drugs companies, and rural communities
have all contributed to the shaping of scientifi c knowledge on healing
plants— but benefi ted differently. These transnational stories remind us
how diffi cult it is to discern who was fi rst to deduce the medicinal value
of a plant. Narratives of discovery often fi xate on singular inventors and
original tribes, yet these accounts are often more mythic than historical.
Although these different parties might seek to claim unique status in
the pro cess of discovery, the argument here is that multiple innovators
participated in the shaping of drug knowledge across wide geographic
regions. To aid in understanding the roots of ongoing confl icts in plant
drug discovery, the book seeks to identify key moments of exchange—
the time and place when people met and shared or stole information
about a par tic u lar plant. These ephemeral points of connection between
different stakeholders held legal implications about who was fi rst in drug
discovery. Documenting these moments of exchange allows us to better
interpret how different parties have made claims to profi ts from success-
ful pharmaceuticals derived from plants. This book therefore has impli-
cations for how we understand and assign credit for scientifi c discovery
and patents, because it indicates that many people identify plant activity
simultaneously.
The six plants in this book make up a meta phorical family of “bitter
roots.” The fi rst four plants that I examined in my own search for healing
in Africa are members of the larger botanical family Apocynaceae, whose
bitter- tasting members with high alkaloidal content have long signaled
the potential for medicinal applications and left greater historical rec ords
in their wake (see Table I.1). Periwinkle and hoodia have been absolutely
https://t.me/med1917
Introduction 3
central to debates about benefi t sharing in drug discovery, not only in
Madagascar and South Africa, but around the world. The lesser known
cases of Strophanthus and Cryptolepis were critical to debates on rights
to plants in the history of Ghana, where I have family ties and began
my research. In “roots markets” where I sought information on healing
plants, bundles of periwinkle lay side by side with stalks of pennywort,
a member of the parsley or carrot botanical family. My discussions with
plant experts in Madagascar led me to include this plant within my
meta phorical family of bitter roots. Similarly, I added the spicy grains
of paradise, a member of the ginger botanical family and a common
ingredient in herbal remedies across West Africa, as a placeholder for the
many healing plants for which the archival record remains silent. Al-
though I began investigations on other useful plants— including miracle
berry, mahogany bark, and a number of oil- bearing plants found in West
and East Africa— I decided to limit this study to cases where African tra-
ditional remedies helped inspire new pharmaceuticals.
1
A common impulse links the biographies of these six plants. In each,
individuals pursued information on medicinal plants that might lead to
new, profi table pharmaceuticals. Although the plants and actors change
in each chapter, they show how different parties engaged in a unifi ed
pro cess of drug discovery and the ways in which a common method
for bringing traditional medicine into the laboratory shifted over time.
By the Early Modern Period (1450s– 1800s), Africans sought treatments
in forests, fi elds, and the outskirts of farms, redistributing herbal seeds
and medicinal recipes within what I term “healing plant diasporas.”
Eu ro pe an colonists adapted these indigenous medicinal recipes in hos-
pitals and laboratories while simultaneously restricting healers from
practicing their trade (1800s– 1950s). After in de pen dence, scientists at
African research centers interacted with their own relatives and healers
in rural areas in their quest to fi nd new pharmaceuticals, taking valu-
able plants into their laboratories (1960s– 2000s). Most recently, policy
makers within the African Union have hoped to reassign profi ts from
plant- based pharmaceuticals along ethnic lines to atone for the colonial
and national appropriation of herbal remedies. Together, the cases show
how class distinctions linked to distinctive historical structures in Afri-
can countries allowed some parties to claim credit for their role in drug
discovery at the expense of others.
The cases further emphasize the wider shift from a colonial model of
open access to natural resources for scientists to a nationalist model of
closed access to plants and information. Colonial occupations in Africa
solidifi ed in the late nineteenth century, providing scientists in Eu rope
https://t.me/med1917
Table I.1 Overview of Plants and Patents Profi led
Family Genus/Species
Pop u lar En glish
Name
Geographic
Distribution
Related Patents Discussed (for
Pro cesses of Chemical Extraction
for Drug Manufacture)
Apocynaceae Catharanthus roseus
(formerly Vinca rosea)
Periwinkle Madagascar (orig.);
pan- tropical: North
and South America,
South and East Asia,
coastal Africa
More than 100 international patents
since 1960.
U.S. Pat. 3,097,137 Vincaleukoblastine
(fi led 1960 by Beer, Cutts, and Noble
of Canada)
U.S. Pat. 3225030 Method of Preparing
Leurosine and Vincaleukoblastine
(fi led 1965 by Eli Lilly and Co.)
Apocynaceae Strophanthus hispidus None. Referred
to as “arrow
poison plant” or
Strophanthus.
West and
Southern Africa
More than twenty since 1914; none
discussed.
Apocynaceae Cryptolepis sanguinolenta None. Referred to
as “bitter roots” or
Cryptolepis.
West Africa U.S. Pat. 5362726 Compound and
method of treatment for falciparum
malaria (fi led 1993 by Healthsearch
Inc. in the United States and the
Centre for Scientifi c Research into
Plant Medicine in Ghana)
U.S. Pat. 5628999 Hypoglycemic agent
from Cryptolepis (fi led 1995 by Shaman
Pharmaceuticals)
https://t.me/med1917
Apocynaceae
(subfamily
Asclepiadoideae)
Hoodia gordonii Hoodia or ghaap Namibia, South Africa More than ten pending patents since
2000.
U.S. Pat 6376657 Pharmaceutical com-
positions having appetite suppressant
activity (fi led 1999 by South Africa’s
Council for Scientifi c and Industrial
Research)
U.S. Pat 6488967 Gastric acid secretion
(fi led 2000 by Phytopharm PLC)
Zingiberaceae Aframomum melegueta Grains of paradise,
Guinea grains,
alligator peppers
West Africa,
Ca rib be an, Brazil
U.S. Pat. 5879682 Aframomum seeds for
improving penile activity (fi led 1995
by Peya Biotech of Canada and
Republic of Congo)
Umbelliferae Centella asiatica Indian pennywort South Asia, West
Africa, Southern
Africa, Madagascar
More than 100 patents since 1960.
U.S. Pat 3365442 / EC C07H15 / 256
Derivatives of Asiaticoside and Their
Pro cess of Preparation; US Pat 3366669
/ EC C07J63 / 00D46
Hemisuccinates and Salts of the Hemi-
Succinates of Asiatic Acid (fi led
1964 – 1968 by Ratsimamanga and
Boiteau of Paris / Madagascar)
Source: Author’s research.
https://t.me/med1917
6 Introduction
with greater access to information on Africa’s healing plants. As the
instance of Strophanthus highlights, colonial subjects resisted efforts to
relocate plants and herbal recipes from African contexts. In the mid- to
late twentieth century, postin de pen dence leadership sought to control
plant information for the national good. But it turns out that investiga-
tions within African countries have depended on colonial herbarium
rec ords as well as global scientifi c standards that stressed the sharing
of information. To manage personal gain, African scientists fi led pat-
ents internationally to protect their research fi ndings without affording
benefi ts to herbalists or communities of plant users. Both colonial and
national models of controlling access to plant medicine served to hide
the many layers of plant experts whose investigations over centuries
have led to recent pharmaceutical innovations.
This book’s focus on the creation of scientifi c identity in modern
African settings may be unfamiliar or uncomfortable for some readers.
Analyses of bioprospecting, the search for new chemicals with industrial
applications from natural sources, frequently emphasize confl icts be-
tween researchers in the Global North and small- scale communities in
the Global South. My account unsettles this common narrative be-
cause it highlights the complexities of exploitation in natural products
research within African countries. In par tic u lar, the cases indicate that
African scientists have sought exclusive rights to drug- making pro cesses,
often without fully acknowledging healers and communities from their
own countries who also helped shape information about plants. At the
same time, my analysis critiques the narratives that scientists from
around the world use to claim plant- based drug patents. The stories
of each plant remedy destabilize hierarchies of knowledge that privilege
“scientifi c” authority over “traditional” medical expertise.
Time and again, these case studies show that the number of po-
tential claims among stakeholders seeking profi ts from plant- based
therapies has depended on the relative geographic distribution of the
plants. From the pantropical weed rosy periwinkle, believed to have
originated in Madagascar, to the peppery cure for impotence known as
“grains of paradise”— found across West Africa, the Middle East, and the
Caribbean— the mobility of plants, people, and information across inter-
national borders has complicated efforts to extend benefi ts to specifi c
communities. The last case study is that of hoodia, a type of milkweed
found in the arid Great Karoo of South Africa that led to a miracle diet
therapy and one of the fi rst benefi t- sharing agreements among scientists
in Africa, drug companies, and rural communities. The initial success of
the agreement depended on the relatively limited domain of the plant
https://t.me/med1917
Introduction 7
and the direct claim to its dietary uses made by a specifi c ethnic group.
In most cases, however, it is diffi cult to fi nd the original own ers of a
plant whose natural history spans countries, continents, and centuries.
These are stories that did not wish to be told. I have had to excavate
these cases in contexts where the publicly available evidence was thin.
Pharmaceutical companies like Eli Lilly and Bristol- Myers Squibb do not
allow public access to their archives and fi ercely protect what they con-
sider their intellectual property. Neither healers nor scientists in African
countries have preserved detailed written rec ords of their investigations,
and each maintains cultures of secrecy when pressed for information. I
have used traces of evidence gleaned from faded pages in archives, dried
plants in markets and museums, and pieces of conversations to document
how various parties sought information on valuable plants. Partial data
from the past alongside recent observations raise important questions
about how we understand the pro cess of plant drug discovery and rights
to pharmaceuticals and profi ts.
A RESOURCE FOR HEALTH AND PROSPERITY
For more than a half century, scientists at African universities have de-
voted themselves to researching the active components of herbal cures.
Plant medicine is one of the continent’s most important resources. Yet,
the commercialization of safe, effective plant- based therapies has remained
elusive. Seldom able to realize the dream of new pharmaceuticals, these
scientists competed with herbalists as they marketed medicinal plants
as teas, syrups, and tonics. The stories told in this book show how con-
fl icting claims to plant medicines have affected efforts to transform tra-
ditional therapies into viable pharmaceuticals for nearly a century. Past
attempts to study herbal remedies provide a much- needed perspective
on the current politics of traditional medicine promotion in African
countries. Given the wide distribution of healing plants, the ongoing ef-
forts of both scientists and healers to claim plants for themselves or their
nation through patents and branded products may be unrealistic.
As I wrote this book, some politicians and scientists nonetheless held
out Africa’s healing plants as a means to both grow economies and com-
bat disease. By the late twentieth century, the failure of synthetic phar-
maceuticals to control drug- resistant malaria or cure new conditions like
HIV/AIDS led to renewed interest in herbal therapies in urban and rural
settings. Since 1997, I have participated in and observed conferences
and workshops on promoting traditional medicine, held for chemists,
https://t.me/med1917
8 Introduction
healers, botanists, drug companies, physicians, historians, anthropolo-
gists, and other stakeholders in Ghana, South Africa, the United King-
dom, and the United States. Often, debates have centered on whether a
healer has indeed discovered a cure for AIDS or malaria.
2
With high hopes,
the African Union declared the opening years of the twenty- fi rst century
to be the De cade of African Traditional Medicine in order to promote
research into plants and other life forms on the continent and surround-
ing oceans. In South Africa, the former president, Thabo Mbeki, and his
health ministers notoriously claimed that roots could treat HIV, confus-
ing the public about the proven value of pharmaceuticals over herbs.
For, at the very same time that the African Union and a growing number
of organizations sought to rebrand traditional medicine as the drugs of
the future, there were calls for equitable distribution of pharmaceuticals
readily available in wealthier countries. Complicating the issue further,
many African elites, and increasingly nonelites, have rejected traditional
medicine in the complex pro cess of adopting Christian and Muslim val-
ues along with “modern” lifestyles.
But in some cases, herbal cures have genuinely offered more promise
than synthetic drugs. Even as African media and the international press
attacked purported herbal cures for AIDS, an ancient Chinese remedy for
fever derived from wormwood emerged as the best hope for combating
malaria, a major scourge on the continent. In 2005, the World Health Or-
ga ni za tion (WHO) recommended artesunate, wormwood’s primary in-
gredient, as the fi rst line of treatment for drug- resistant malaria. Many
researchers and policy makers in Africa interpreted the WHO statement
as an endorsement of their ongoing efforts to promote the commercial
value, if not the spiritual claims, of traditional medicine. The World
Bank began to investigate the potential of standardized herbal remedies
as a way to bring African countries out of poverty by strengthening re-
gional and global markets. In accepting foreign aid, African Ministries
of Health agreed to reverse discriminatory policies against healers, con-
ducted formal censuses of traditional medical practitioners, and held
seminars to help them improve their remedies.
3
Let us return to the humid classroom, where healers participated
in a workshop on improving the quality of their herbal preparations at
the University of Ghana, Legon, in 2002. These healers, most of whom
specialized in herbal medicine merchandise, joined scientists from sev-
eral universities as well as offi cials from the Ministry of Health. Because
of advertisements promoting the workshop in the newspapers, healers
had expected to gain useful information on ways to standardize herbal
preparations.
4
But, as I observed during the proceedings, herbal manu-
https://t.me/med1917
Introduction 9
facturers were wary of some of the other participants as well as confer-
ence sponsors. More generally, healers in Ghana were reluctant to provide
information on key ingredients in their products after new regulations
required them to test for toxicity at government laboratories before adver-
tising their products. The herbal sellers wanted to keep secret formulas to
themselves, whereas the laboratory researchers believed disclosure would
help them test for toxic contaminants more effi ciently. For scientists and
health offi cials, the prospect of toxic Ghanaian herbal medicines on the
international market led them to urge ingredient disclosure, laboratory
tests, and standardization of dosages. In the years after the workshop,
many healers relented and disclosed ingredients— but only after the gov-
ernment briefl y banned all advertisements of herbal products.
5
African herbal producers have become increasingly conversant with
international preoccupations with standards, toxicity, and intellectual
property rights in their efforts to expand the market for African herbal
medicine products. Consider the case of a tradition Ewe tonic marketed
to retailers abroad as a means of circumventing regulations for advertis-
ing in Ghana. The herbal producer R. K. Assiamah concerned himself
primarily with competition from Ghanaian herbal producers, even while
exploring potential markets overseas. Indeed, he applied for approval of
his pop u lar nutritive tonic by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration
(FDA), but his application was denied.
6
Another version of the traditional
Ewe tonic was Alafi a Bitters, a preparation made by the Atiako family
from medicinal roots steeped in water and alcohol (a photograph from
their facilities appears as Figure I.1 at the beginning of this Introduction).
Like Assiamah, the herbal manufacturer Djane Atiako explained to me
that his father gleaned recipes for the Alafi a brand products from family
members, naming them after the Hausa phrase for “good health.” He ex-
plained that his father was the “fi rst to introduce herbs to the drugstore”
before Ghana’s in de pen dence. Government export fi gures used the names
of these two leading brands for Ghanaian bitters interchangeably. In 1990,
at least 1,000 bottles of Alafi a Bitters (with a reported value of US$766)
made their way to foreign markets. By 2000, reported exports for Ala-
fi a and Assiamah Bitters had expanded to around US$21,000; additional
medicinal plant and seed exports were valued at US$467,000.
7
Although
Ghanaian government workers admitted to me that there were limited in-
centives for accurate reporting of the real value of exports, these approxi-
mate fi gures hint at the wide circulation of Alafi a and Assiamah Bitters in
international produce shops that appeal to the African Diaspora.
Traditional medicine and its plant therapies were in transition during
the time of my research. As urban areas expanded and climate change
https://t.me/med1917
10 Introduction
loomed, pop u lar knowledge of plants near farms and along rural roads
was dissipating, and many plants faced extinction. In Ghana, Mada-
gascar, and South Africa, plant sellers told me their suppliers had to
go deeper and deeper into the forests. At the same time, people found
new sources for plants along university campus boulevards, and I saw
collectors gathering overgrown fl ora from urban roadsides. Perhaps
it will be university researchers, rather than traditional healers, who
will extend the documentation and use of plant medicines into the
next millennia in African countries. With the development of com-
prehensive courses in herbal medicine at African universities, the dream
of jump- starting economic development with phytochemical industries
has continued to gain supporters. Meanwhile, traditional practitioners
have shown no signs of closing their shrines and clinics, increasingly
hybridizing animist beliefs with Christianity, Islam, and biomedicine.
The search for healing plants in Africa will continue.
PRIORITY, PATENTS, AND THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE
The problem of priority is critical to understanding confl icts over plant
information. Groups of plant experts have constructed narratives of pri-
ority, omitting details on the many protagonists participating in knowl-
edge production. Historians and sociologists of science have adopted a
slightly different sense of “priority” than, say, lawyers, for whom it holds
less of a philosophical gradient. In this book, my concern with priority in
patent law stems from what it tells us about how societies value claims to
fi rst rights: in other words, a driving question of this book is “Who was
fi rst?” Patents hold relevance for the stories that follow, especially in the
United States and Eu rope, where actors fi led pro cess patents for exclusive
rights to derive molecules from plants with pharmaceutical applications.
By the late nineteenth century, when Eu ro pe an and North American
countries coordinated national offi ces for inventors to register copyrights
and patents through a series of international agreements, patents were
awarded to those who were fi rst, those who held priority. In patent law,
generally, priority has been tied to novelty and the question of whether
an individual or a company was the fi rst to present a new technique with
industrial applications. Patents provided the assignee with the exclusive
right to a pro cess or device for the claimed uses for a set number of years.
In the United States, priority has been limited by what was previously
written down and published; in Eu rope and some Asian patent laws, oral
testimony or material previously published on Web sites might trump a
https://t.me/med1917
Introduction 11
claim for priority in a patent application. Earlier claims to a purportedly
novel idea are termed “prior art” and may be used to upset a patent.
8
The pro cess of bioprospecting allows us to interrogate the global and
social contours of invention and possibilities of prior art, especially ear-
lier claims to purported discovery in oral cultures. The term “bioprospect-
ing,” from “biological diversity prospecting,” dates to around 1992 and
covers the search for new chemicals that are derived from biological
matter and that have industrial applications. Bioprospecting is related to
patents, as these industrial applications were increasingly the subject of
exclusive legal claims in offi ces in North America and Eu rope. Around
the same time that the term “bioprospecting” became pop u lar, interna-
tional structures like the World Trade Or ga ni za tion (WTO), the World
Intellectual Property Or ga ni za tion, the United Nations, and the World
Bank began to encourage member nations more consistently to respect
patents and establish uniform patent laws.
Even with incentives for wider adoption of drug patents, by the end
of the twentieth century both product patents for biologically derived
compounds and pro cess patents for their manufacture met fi erce criti-
cism. A spectrum of organizations called for drug companies to compen-
sate communities from which plants and information were sourced.
Populations living in biologically rich but eco nom ical ly impoverished
regions made a number of explicit agreements with researchers at uni-
versities and drug companies. By the 1990s, bioprospecting and compen-
sation had emerged as highly politicized issues. This book examines the
full dimensions of possible contribution and exchange in pharmaceuti-
cal discovery. Particularly, it shows how patents for pro cesses to create
pharmaceuticals intersected with the rights of indigenous communities,
scientists, and drug companies.
9
The question of who was fi rst can be asked of both the scientifi c and
traditional investigations of the medicinal applications of a given plant.
In all the cases considered here, bioprospecting depended on traditional
plant recipes for inspiration. Histories of early modern medicine have
probed the importance of folk therapies, especially as sustained through
women healers in Eu rope, but modern pharmaceutical histories em-
phasize the rise of synthetic drugs and laboratory discoveries.
10
A few
investigations of pharmaceuticals from the 1920s to the 1980s show their
global range, with gestures toward understanding the history of drugs
like penicillin or oral contraceptives in Asian, African, and Latin Ameri-
can contexts.
11
Historians of science will be familiar with the question of who was
fi rst in the realm of scientifi c discovery. For many years, such historians
https://t.me/med1917
Соседние файлы в папке Библиотека им академика М.И. Перельмана